esogu_arch.01

“In 1994, Microsoft designers Mark Malamud and Erik Gavriluk approached Brian Eno to compose music for the Windows 95 project. The result was the six-second start-up music-sound of the Windows 95 operating system, "The Microsoft Sound". In an interview with Joel Selvin in the San Francisco Chronicle he said:

The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, "Here's a specific problem – solve it."

The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be ​3 1⁄4 seconds long."

I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel.

Dear Twenty-Something Steve,

This is a letter from your future.

In twenty-something years’ time, the editor of The Architectural Review will invite you to write a letter of advice to a young architect. Good advice is specific so I decided to write to you, my younger self.

Kurt Vonnegut’s dad – an architect – famously advised his son: ‘Never take liquor into the bedroom. Never stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect’. Each imperative could only have been born of a bad experience. But would you listen to such advice? Especially from your dad, who your future self sees himself turning into day by day? In your youthful arrogance, would you do what all the architects you’ve asked for advice have already half-jokingly advised you to do – something else? You should, but you won’t because you will always be a moth to architecture’s light, forever banging your head against the window pane trying to get in from the dark. And all the other moths know it.

‘Don’t do things just to make others happy. But be useful and make others happy because that will make you friends’

I started this letter a dozen times, each time failing more spectacularly than the previous. It has alternated between being unnecessarily pessimistic and gushingly optimistic, depending on what kind of day I was having. I have scratched out lists of clichéd and contradictory imperatives that you could find in a ‘you can have it all’ list from a 1990s woman’s magazine that anyone would and should ignore:

Don’t be too useful to others. All-nighters are counterproductive and part of macho architecture culture that should be resisted. Be interested in your own career and don’t do things just to make others happy. But be useful and make others happy because that will make you friends. And architecture is not an individual endeavour, so make sure you associate with good people. Find interesting people and read what they read. Don’t move onto the next thing until you’ve done the thing you’re currently doing well. There are two types of people: those who do things and those who get things done – the latter are the more successful. Redefine success. Get used to rejection and failure because they are the norm. Take more risks and play more. Gravitate to the edge. Find a daily rhythm that suits the way you work. Kill your darlings. Never explain, never apologise. Don’t listen to anyone’s advice.

See? Generic advice might be well-intentioned, but it’s just a Desiderata. I also tried writing lists of things that I have discovered and enjoyed along the way that you should look out for (in no particular order):

‘The feeling of alienation – of simply “not getting it” – never recedes’

Annie Choi’s ‘Dear Architects I am Sick of your Shit’ (2007); Reyner Banham’s ‘Black Box’ essay (1990); Crimson Architectural Historians; Constructivism; FAT; Luigi Snozzi; Paul Rudolph; Gottfried Böhm; Jonathan Meades; Marie-José Van Hee; James Corner’s Taking Measures across the American Landscape (1996); Ricardo Bofill’s converted cement factory near Barcelona; Chris Ware; Sheffield’s Park Hill/Hyde Park/Kelvin and Gleadless Valley housing; Michael Sorkin, especially his ‘250 Things an Architect Should Know’ (2018); Gillespie, Kidd & Coia; OMA’s Netherlands Embassy, Berlin and Kunsthal, Rotterdam; David Chipperfield’s Neues Museum, Berlin; O’Donnell + Tuomey; Grafton; Peter Womersley; Lacaton & Vassal; Studio 804; Olson Kundig; John Summerson; Peter Aldington; Beatriz Colomina.

But what have I learned in nearly thirty years of studying, working in, studying, running away from, more studying, more working in and around, teaching, and researching architecture that might be useful to you, my young, naïve lepidoptera? The feeling of alienation – of simply ‘not getting it’ – never recedes. In fact, like the feeling of failure and rejection, it will only increase. That’s not bad-day writing: you will get used to it. Architecture is not what you think it is and will continue to frustrate you with its resistance to definition and pindownability (that’s a word in 2020). But you will slowly realise, on good days, that this is also its potency and opportunity.

The scales will fall from your eyes when you read Garry Stevens’ The Favored Circle (2002) while studying for your Part 3 and learning to reflect and critique through the disappointment of architectural practice. This book will introduce you to Pierre Bourdieu and will open up a world of sociology that will make complete sense of how architecture works, as a culture and as a system rather than just as an industry and assemblage of components. It turns out that architecture’s not about tectonics, construction, drawings or contracts any more than it is about place and context and history and landscape. And it’s not about people and politics and community any more than it is about representation and theory or the poetry of space and materiality and the play of light across a surface. It’s about all of these things and then some, in different proportions. Obvious, right?

‘The crit is more about enculturation than education’

But you will listen for too long trying to extract some sense from tutors arguing with each other in crits and architects showing-and-telling that ‘architecture is this!’ and ‘architecture is that!’ and it will confuse the hell out of you. You will learn that the crit is more about enculturation than education – about the reinforcement of power structures that are built on foundations of ‘enthusiastic propaganda’ to misquote John Summerson. It is more about who you are and how you act (your habitus) than what you know or do. You will learn that architecture is the constant debate about how we should live as a society (what architecture could and should be) and that successful architects are those who are best able to convince other people to believe in their vision for the future.

To participate in this ‘discourse’ – to let yourself in from the dark – you need to be able to discern what is good and why you believe it to be so. The parameters and criteria that enable you to make those judgements are not written anywhere and you will have to infer or invent them yourself. Fortunately (or unfortunately if you’re having a bad day), this is a lifelong endeavour and while the list above might give you some indicators, it’s the inquisitive act of creating your own judgement where learning occurs. It is in this process of becoming that architecture appears: you can only work out what you think by doing it, by ‘practising’.

On bad days, architecture is full of fakes and frauds and egos and bullshitters and posers and all that shenanigans that you hate. But on good days, it’s full of everything that you love: really clever, creative people with integrity and humour and sincerity, all trying to make the world a better place. Again, you need to cultivate and exercise discernment. Good architecture, like good advice, only makes sense when it’s specific and enacted.

Good luck from your future self, Dr Stephen Parnell

PS: Technology is most definitely not the answer. But having said that, buy shares in Google and Amazon.

Dear colleague,

The world is waiting for a new generation of architects, ready for a break, and tired of this rat race for money and success. Tired of all those breathtaking acrobatic heaven-high efforts, of all that architecture on steroids, eager to please only successful, rich, glamorous people. It is time to return to basic values.

With our confusing crisis, now or never it is the moment to step down to the ground floor of life and its basic grammar instead of blindly following the formal language of what we consider architecture today. The present crisis shows us the desperate efforts of people to get together and, once and for all, the need for social contact is becoming clear. We have learned how architectural organisations systematically neglected social cohesion and conditions for belonging in favour of serving and even stimulating individualism. Just look at the endless galleries, staircases, corridors, measured simply for circulation with not one square metre dedicated to meeting each other. Buildings as separate units, merely like storage boxes chopped up into floors and separating walls; devices to protect us from each other. Lots of green also, but what happened to the streets that have traditionally kept the city together, providing room for belonging? We need streets as room for children to play near the front doors of their homes and also for neighbours to meet. See how, since public places have been in lockdown, people have congregated around tables outside, adopting a living room quality so domesticating the public realm.

‘We should consider buildings more as instruments, open to different tasks at different times’

Instead of designing with exclusively specific purposes in mind we should also include space for alternative interpretations, which are generated by spontaneous situations. Every horizontal plane may become a table under certain circumstances but whether we call it a table is dependent on its context. Or take a violin, for sure to produce sound, hopefully leading to music, but the genre is free, as well as the sound quality which depends on the ability and mood of the player more than the quality of the instrument. We plea for more freedom and a less nailed-down functional approach. Maybe we should consider buildings more as instruments, open to different tasks at different times.

My plea is that you succeed in getting away from all our bad habits and that you may realise that being successful does not mean that you are on the right track of doing what might be necessary for the world of today. An architect is supposed to provide for better conditions, for everybody, and I hope that you may have an eye for the extraordinary quality of ordinary things, such as shoes that fit you and serve you while walking. I suggest you look for basics, as long as it accommodates.

Good luck, Herman Hertzberger

Amsterdam 27 May 2020